Premier League Begins Tender to Sell Soccer Rights in United States: The Daily EPL

The race begins today to find out who will win the media rights to the Premier League’s 2013-16 seasons on US television and Internet. The Premier League has invited companies to begin the process, which could involve a bidding war between FOX, beIN SPORT, ESPN, NBC and others. The decision regarding who gets the rights will have a profound impact on our viewing experience, so this will be a story that we’ll follow closely. We won’t know the winner for more than a week, but we now know the process has at least begun.

Here are the Premier League news headlines today. Lots of great stories!

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37 Responses to Premier League Begins Tender to Sell Soccer Rights in United States: The Daily EPL

Personally I would love ESPN to win the rights, then maybe have a dedicated soccer channel. I am tired of FOX, tired of Warren Barton and his bffs. As for bein sports, I have fios and I wonder when that will be available. I do not know anything about NBC and their sports coverage but I doubt they’ll be able to have a say in this…

I’m betting it stays on Fox. The other networks may do a better job of presenting the games, however the sheer number of properties Fox owns makes things like showing all the final day games live across a bunch of networks possible. I can’t imagine ESPN doing something like that. They’d have to take over ABC stations to do it. Maybe they would, but I doubt it. The only network that could come close to doing what Fox does would be NBC. And since NBC really only has Notre Dame college football and Sunday Night Football, they have the space for it. They could probably show one game a week on broadcast NBC and actually improve their ratings a lot.

If Fox loses the rights, I’m not sure how good it will be for soccer in America overall. Fox Soccer becomes a lot less desirable as a channel. And if Fox loses their best soccer content, what effort do they put into the World Cup when they air it?

If ESPN wins the rights, where do the games air? ESPN and ESPN2 have College Football for a big chunk of the season. They’re not getting rid of that. They’d probably have to launch a dedicated channel, and I’m just not sure we need another ESPN.

ESPN or BeIn, whoever provides me with the most coverage of my club and access to it at any time on any device, with INTELLIGENT analysis, critique or every coach is good, especially when it is articulated well. Fox fails on so many levels at this. The Foxsoccer2go app aside, I hope fox looses the deal! If they Keep it, They need to get rid of the current crop Stone, Barton, Wynalda. The irish guy costigan is fine, not great, but certainly better than the former.

I hate Fox Soccer’s coverage and analysis. But I love their access. I get at least 3 live games a week from them, plus a couple more on delay. On big days they play games on the Fox Network and show even more games. On the last day of the season they had things on almost all of their properties.

BeIN can’t do that yet, they simply don’t have enough channels. They’ll have to show two games max, and if we’re lucky they’ll sub license extra games to Fox Soccer and/or ESPN.

ESPN has the channels, but from August to December College Football is going to take precedent. The 10AM and 12AM time slots are filled on all of their properties. Unless they launch a new channel, I don’t see how the access gets better for most people. Of course if they had every game available on ESPN 3 and the Watch ESPN apps, I’d be all over it. But I bet most people prefer to get their TV on traditional channels.

BeIn could ramp up pretty fast if they wanted to, all they need is 1 channel and the rest online via subscription or via an app, just like sunday ticket os available on the PS3. a mix of that format and the watch espn app would bee great.

It’s the coverage tho too, the quality of the coverage needs to improve for whatever network wins. eg: whats the point of having a show called goals on sunday of you don’t show all the goals? they pick whatever ones they feel are significant thats it… also the edit’s made on match recaps at half time or full time are weak sauce, it feels like they rush and limit what they show so they can get to a commercial break.

So much advertising just slapped on without any effort like the pizza hut..whatever. its just sad. I get to watch the sky coverage using the power of the interwebs and it is not even close, there is advertising on sky but it’s done much more elegantly and because the content itself has more substance the adverts don’t seem so bad.

Sky and MOTD have been around a while you would think fox and espn would have learned from them. I hope BPL put quality restrictions on licensing content.

Sack Stone, Barton and Wynalda and pay for real pundits… if there is an american that can do it then fine, but that shouldn’t be the requirement.

The 3 that got the boot from fox soccer report I thought were pretty good at what they did and could certainly do abetter job than stone and co… I have no idea of their names, 1 woman and 2 guys, one guy was irish. I have no idea why they got rid of them when they went to HD, this new crew aren’t very good….sorry new crew, but its true.

I get BeIN, the presentation looks very good but I only watched it during the World Cup qualifying (South American matches).

I, like dust, can’t stand Stone and Barton (I don’t mind Wynalda too much, but he has definetly toned it down since joining Fox). I don’t even watch the pre/post-CL shows anymore, they only care about 5-6 teams (the 4 EPL sides + Barca/Real), I want more in depth coverage. I like all the major leagues in Europe and their knowledge of teams outside these 5/6 clubs is limited (Wynalda knows a bit of the Bundesliga to his credit)

The worst was when Stone/Barton did the Super Cup, they knew very little about Atletico Madrid and seemed to have no clue who Falcao was until the match!!

Last weekend FSC showed St Johnstone vs Celtic. Does anybody know if they are still going to continue showing SPL matches. I will not pay $15 for Plus since half their leagues shown last year are now on Bein.

ESPN have never bid on the rights and aren’t going to start now for reasons others have already stated. They may continue to sub-license from whomever wins the rights, but that’s it. NBC has also never bid and I have read nothing to suggest that is about to change.

If there is a battle at all it will be between Fox and beIN Sport. beIN may not even be interested, just as with the UK rights. We’ll know soon enough.

How do you know ESPN won’t bid? Also they recently lost out on World Cup bidding so it makes sense they’d try something different. They’ve recently remodeled their whole soccernet website so nabbing the PL rights would fit in with their whole rebranding of ESPN FC.

I agree with people that Fox’s presentation can suck but for me it’s all about the games when it’s all said and done. If Fox loses this battle, we might have to prepare for the worse.

Last season people could watch all live Ligue 1, La Liga and almost all Serie A to very limited number of live games this season. This weekend on Bein 5/9 La Liga games are live, only 1 live out of 10 Ligue 1 games, and 3 out 10 Serie A. Went from almost all live to very low number now.

Sure things might change over time, but it takes European soccer coverage in US a few years back for sure the second EPL is gone from FOX, we’ll then have to wait months maybe years until all coverage can be available to everyone again.

I think many people wanting Fox to lose the right take what we have now for granted, we have ability to watch every EPL game live, sure can be costly but it’s available, who knows if we’ll ever get that chance again if Fox lose the rights.

You seem to take having all matches live as granted. Here in the UK we have to work around a Saturday blackout so even if we wanted to watch a European game we’re not allowed – in fact we can’t watch any football at all on TV between 2.45pm & 5.15pm! Wait for beIN to win the Crown Jewels… They’ll soon step it up a few notches if they do. Online streaming and more carriage deals is my prediction of the day

my fear with ESPN is soccer will get the treatment of the other sports- hype hype hype and it will be all big 4- ESPN I think is guilty of over coverage with self designed hype issues and you don’t get good analysis- MLB is way better than ESPN in baseball analysis, their college basketball crews get self promoting dinosaurs like Bobby Knight and poor coverage of the game itself. NFL look at the Tebow garbage. I don’t trust ESPN – they also will try and demand increased pay off with cable companies-they are too big as it is.

The Premier League will give the rights to the highest bidder obviously. They could care less about the growth of the game here through Fox’s coverage. Yes the pundits and hosts are naff and there are so many other faults with their coverage but by showing live games on a reasonably easy to get channel, the game has prospered here. Football will never be that big here but the growth in the last 10 years or so has been impressive. And Fox is a big reason why. If BeIn bid more though then they win even though it makes so much more sense to leave as is with Fox and ESPN having the rights.

It will be bad if beIN gets it. If they stay with one channel we will miss many live matches and not have as many matches to choose from as they only have one english channel. If they add a channel it is still bad as we will have to go through the whole “who is going to carry it” drama again. I personally will deal with the bad coverage or commentating or whatever because I am just grateful that I can pretty much watch any match on any given weekend with the way things are set up now. Sooo….. hope Fox keeps it and subs more to ESPN.

Where will they air all the games? Have you guys not seen what ESPN does with the European Championships, and World Cup? They put them all on ESPN 3 (the online channel)so you can watch one, two, or five games at once.

Sorry if you don’t like watching games through the internet but just hook up your computer to your flatscreen and it’s just like TV.

I’m just a unabashed ESPN fanboy when it comes to their soccer coverage. They do a great job on the website (pretty much the only soccer website I go), I’ve always enjoyed Ian Darke’s play by play. They just do a great job and I hope they get it.

I have beIn on Dish and it’s awful. The little avatar on the screen says its “HD” but it ain’t. It’s a 4:3 SD picture and it’s horrible on a big screen. I’ve probably been spoiled by the HD pictures on Fox and ESPN (which is the best by far), but it’s almost impossible for me to watch beIN.

I think I said this before ESPN needs to pick up the EPL rights. No World Cup down the roadonly one or two games a week. Pretty lame, however, if they got the rights, if a perfect world you could have easy access to any game. Let me lay it out with this format:
Saturday:
7:45-ESPN2
10AM-ESPN2,ABC,FOX,NBC Sports,Fox Soccer
12:45-Fox Soccer
Sunday:
8:30-NBC Sports
11AM-ABC
Monday:
3PM-ESPN2
Games during the week can just be spread arounf randomly. None of this would take crucial programming from each channel. 8 of the 10 games live on basic cable.